‘The Limit Does Not Exist’ In This Dynamic Forbes Podcast

Have you ever been told you have too many interests? Just pick one! Podcasters Christina Wallace and Cate Scott Campbell know the feeling, comes with the territory when you don’t fit into a box. That’s why they call themselves “hyphenates,” or even better, they say they have “dynamic skill sets.” These bold ladies recently launched a Forbes podcast for all you unicorns out there called, The Limit Does Not Exist.

The podcast title comes from a line in the cult classic film, Mean Girls, when Lindsay Lohan’s character, Cady Heron, while competing in the math team championship, gives the game-winning answer, “the limit does not exist.”

Wallace said the podcast looks at role models with a lot of interests and discusses “how one informs the other or gives them insight or inspiration or this diagonal ability to connect ideas that has helped them be successful.”

Because of their many diverse interests, “Christina and I by nature call ourselves ‘human venn diagrams,’” Campbell said. Wallace is steeped in startups, Campbell is in media, and they both are very passionate about STEM and have their toes in non-profits. Hardly box-fitting.

When Forbes approached these dynamic ladies to create a podcast, they immediately came up with the idea to do something centered around STEM but wanted to broaden the scope. Wallace explained that they wanted to devise a new approach to STEM by creating an intersection between creativity and the arts, “because that’s how we access it.”

Wallace majored in math in college and Campbell, as she puts it, “fell into STEM kind of through a side door.”

Campbell was in advanced math classes all throughout high school, but ultimately went to school for theatre and English after graduation, and moved to New York City to pursue acting. She worked as a waitress to pay rent, but said she was a horrible waitress, so when a woman approached her about tutoring math, she gave it a try. This led to a decade-long career in tutoring where she found that 95 percent of her students were girls and fueled her to create her girl-empowerment blog, 11 Betties.

“I really just somehow instinctively knew how to flip the approach to math because tutoring is all about turning on a light in a student and I found time and time again that the lack of understanding or joy in math with a girl always came from a disconnect in the material,” Campbell said.

Campbell saw a need for math to be talked about in a way that could really get girls excited and she wasn’t seeing it anywhere else. She found very quickly that it wasn’t just resonating with teenage girls, but with a broader demographic.

Wallace and Campbell are tired of people being scared of math and other STEM subjects.

“I get it, you have PTSD over some of this. That’s fine, but there’s another way to really connect and understand and have this part of your life,” Wallace said.

Wallace is very passionate about getting people excited about STEM. She’s the founder of BridgeUp: Stem at the American Museum of Natural History that inspires girls and minorities to get into computer science. She’s said she’s tired of being the only women in the room in math and tech fields. She wants to inspire girls to enter these careers and thrive.

“I think we are seeing in the last, I don’t know, five, seven years, a renewed interest in STEM that I don’t really think has been as much a priority naturally since WWII,” Wallace said.

She believes this is because we are looking at the future of our economy with the new digital revolution and realizing we don’t have employees to fill these jobs in the next 20-30 years.

“Someone has described it as the Rosie Riveter moment,” Wallace said. “We have jobs sitting open and no one to fill them and we have often an educational system that is preparing people for jobs of the last century, not jobs of this century.”

The podcast is about STEM, but it’s not just about STEM. “The show is also really essentially about being someone who is so curious about many things and what it is like to try to forge a dynamic career path that doesn’t look like one that has existed before,” Campbell said.

STEM is ultimately what brought these two ladies together (funny enough, they met on April 14, Pi Day), and they celebrated their year of friendship by launching their podcast.

we taped our first episode live from @sxsw this morning in honor of #piday and our one-year friendiversary! can't wait to share it with you!

The show airs twice a month on the second and last Tuesday each month. Each episode begins with a fun discussion about things Campbell and Wallace have seen or read about in the world of STEM, and then goes into guest interviews. Their second episode dropped last Tuesday with an interview with Bobak Ferdowsi (ake The Mohawk Guy) who is an engineer on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He became an internet sensation when he was spotted at the Mars Curiosity Landing with a mohawk.

Their next guest is Danielle Feinberg, a director of photography at Pixar, “who has actually spent her life as a computer scientist working on storytelling and animation.”

Wallace explained that because of her and Campbell’s interests and personal networks, most of their guests in the first season will be women. Through these interviews, Campbell and Wallace want to give tangible, actionable advice to their listeners to make dynamic careers attainable.

Wallace said the overall goal of the podcast is to show varied role models and help people understand “how you can build a career and a life that fits all of the pieces of you.”

“I hope that people will kind of think of our show as an entertaining type of research on their road to self discovery,” Campbell said.

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Mandy is the managing editor of Bold.global. She’s obsessed with TV and with that passion she created Primetime Addiction that she grew to reach 25,000+ people a month. Mandy holds a master’s degree in magazine journalism from England. She’s contributed to publications in New York, Florida and the United Kingdom.